Monday Jul 14, 2014

Oracle Retail's Assortment Planning solutions are categorized by Gartner as a "leader" in their Magic Quadrant. Oracle's solution consists of Oracle Retail Assortment Planning which is focused on short-life merchandise catered for fashion and Oracle Retail Category Management which is geared towards long life cycle merchandise prevalent in grocery and hardlines businesses.

Oracle is positioned the furthest for both Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. The report, which was published in July 2014, notes “Marketplace pressures driven by the consumerization of retailing require retailers to become customer-centric. Now is the time for multichannel retailers to invest in assortment management applications that enable customer-centric assortments.”

Combining today’s Commerce Anywhere empowered consumers with intense competitive pressure, channel blurring, and rapidly changing consumer purchasing behavior, retailers are finding it more difficult to align their assortments to customer demand. Oracle Retail Assortment Planning provides an end-to-end workflow to define and execute local market and micro-site assortments to improve conversion of traffic into sales/margin and to increase customer satisfaction. Oracle's solution has helped retailers across the world realize benefits such as:

• Targeted customer-centric assortments aligned to assortment strategies and optimized to available space• Reduced out of stocks/out of sizes• Improved inventory turnover• Reduced markdowns and improved margins• Cleaner seasonal transitions and fresher merchandise in the stores

To truly optimize planning, assortment, pricing and promotions in an ever-changing retail market, retailers need to leverage processes to utilize a single, common platform that facilitates understanding across channels and across disciplines. Oracle Retail offers a tightly integrated series of products that allow high-level decisions to be connected directly to low-level execution. For merchandisers, that means making price, sales, and space-aware assortment decisions and driving those decisions to the supply chain.

The "secret sauce" behind this and other Oracle Retail planning solutions is the multi-dimensional no-SQL datastore, which delivers cost-effective performance and scalability while leveraging the best algorithms science has to offer. Today it’s imperative that retailers align their assortments to meet demand, maximize opportunities, improve margins, and increase customer satisfaction. As I've discussed before, its the mix of art and science that propel the best retailers forward.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Oracle.

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